BASIC PLOT
Benny journeys to Dimetos as the request of a friend who is being stalked. Amidst corporations developing devastating weapons technology, the real danger comes from a mythological creature seeking a revenge from long, long ago. Why, yes, this is an NA, since you ask.

FEATURING
Professor Bernice Summerfield.

COMPANIONS
None.

PREPARATORY READING
None.

CONTINUITY REFERENCES
Pg 8 "I'm listening to nothing but Pachar opera at the moment, and it's driving me crazy." I suspect that's supposed to read Pakhar, which is a reference to the Hamster-like creatures who first appeared in Legacy and have popped up here and there ever since.

Pg 11 "The Greytest Hips of Johnny Chess." Johnny Chess is an annoying invention of Cornell, Day and Topping, allegedly the son of Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright. He is a singer who would later marry Tegan, as you might expect. His main appearance is in The King of Terror, although there are a number of other cameos.

Pg 12 "You try getting through one of Dr Follett's intimate soirees without the aid of alcohol or mind-numbing drugs. Or a gas mask, for that matter." We first met Dr Follett, head of Archaeology at St Oscar's, and his localized atmosphere of chlorine, in Oh No It Isn't!

Pg 25 "Well, I suppose he might have hired a Pink or someone to keep tabs on me." Pinks were mentioned, very briefly, in Mean Streets.

Pg 28 "And then she thought of Jason, and it was like fingering an old operation scar." This is the first direct mention of Benny's ex-husband, Jason Kane, in the book, after a couple of indirect references. There are more, but I don't record them all.

Pg 30 After an oblique reference to "EB" on Pg 29, we get here, "You mentioned Eurogen Butler." Well, there's a turn up for the books. The Butler Institute first appeared way back in Cat's Cradle: Warhead, and we learned that it merged with the Eurogen Company to become Eurogen Butler in Deceit (in 2107 to be precise, which matches the historical timeline here nicely). Incidentally, you can see the Butler Institute in the New York skyline shown in the new series episode The Poison Sky, one of very few absolutely direct references to events the NAs in the new series. Like Jason, EB are a pain in the arse mentioned throughout the book, and I won't record every occurrence.

Pg 42 "The incredibly advanced race known only as the People would simply manipulate energy fields to peel back the turf." This utterly unnecessary continuity reference has been brought to you by The Also People (in the Doctor Who NAs) and Walking to Babylon (in the Benny ones).

Pg 66 "Once, on the holiday planet of Asnasl..." The whole story of Benny's time on this planet with her friend Zavijava Akubens sounds like a reference to something. But it isn't, so don't bother looking it up.

Pg 106 "And then a burning cigarette stabbing down, just behind the knuckle. A scream of pain. And then I remembered that the scream was mine - or had been, rather. My interrogation by a Nazi called Oskar Steinmann." Another gratuitous reference, this time to Just War.

Pg 132 "A chance diplomatic encounter with the dragon people, some hundred years before their war with the Earth Empire." These are the Draconians, unnamed here to avoid copyright infringement, and both they and the aforementioned war appeared in Frontier in Space. Lots of NAs, especially Love and War, riffed on the fallout from that war.

Pg 152 "Bernice scowled, then did as she was told, reciting poetry from the Early Ikkaban period." The Ikkabans are mentioned in SLEEPY and important in Walking to Babylon.

Pg 162 "I've heard of things like this, ideas... morphic fields, spread through space and time... I think Benny mentioned something of the sort." Because she'd come across them in Lucifer Rising.

Pg 163 "The Shiga myth marks the earliest record of Thuban storymaking, like Earth's Gilgamesh." From Timewyrm: Genesys (and Mesopotamian legend).

Pg 183 "He - it - was noteworthy only in as much as his sudden arrival had interrupted what had probably been a rather grand dinner party." The autopsy on Csokor is, seemingly quite deliberately, a riff on Grace operating on the seventh Doctor in the Telemovie: the surgeon is female and has been called in from a social event, the dead body isn't actually dead and, furthermore...

Pg 187 ..."'Who am I?' he asked", is what the newly reanimated creature says as he struggles back to himself, exactly as the eighth Doctor did, and then...

Pg 187-188 ..."Muscle tone changed, bones began to re-form. Within moments the jacket fitted him perfectly" which reflects both the Doctor's regeneration and the famous "These shoes! They fit perfectly!" line from said Telemovie.

Pg 192 "Well, you know what they say about rumours of death..." Yes, they say that it's one of the best episodes that there was of Blake's 7, and they are correct in that conclusion.

Pg 196 "So that even as it primed its weapons systems to take out the designated target quickly and cleanly, a different part of its mental field was reciting Antaren poetry." The Rutans had a base on Antares in the Antares System in Lords of the Storm and the planet is also mentioned in Placebo Effect (released a month before Another Girl, Another Planet).

Pg 221 "'The Shiga crushes worlds as we might tread on flowers as we walk towards our final destination. It doesn't even trouble to disdain us...' 'The Shiga's just a myth,' said Bernice." The implication of the sequence here is that the Shiga, or something related to it, was going to be the next big bad in the dramatic fall of Dellah that was already on the cards at this point. This was probably nixed when someone decided to use the Ferutu (from Cold Fusion) instead in Twilight of the Gods.

Pg 226 "It was the stranger she'd encountered just before she'd left for Dimetos. The man very deliberately lit a cigarette with some sort of metal lighter than stank of ancient fuel. He puffed on it contentedly for a few moments, eyebrows raised as if encouraging a response." Who could this mysterious cigarette-smoking man who utters double-speak, offers cryptic commentary and dubious help before disappearing possibly be? To be honest, I'm not sure at the moment, but I bet that he's played by William B. Davis.

Pg 230 Reference to Youkali University. The planet Youkali has been mentioned or visited in many books by Kate Orman to whit: Return of the Living Dad, SLEEPY, So Vile a Sin and Unnatural History.

OLD FRIENDS AND OLD ENEMIES
Joseph, Benny's helpful droid.

Some of Benny's students, unnamed, but presumably the same ones we've seen before.

NEW FRIENDS AND NEW ENEMIES
Lizbeth Fugard; her associate Homam Matar Sadalbari; and her ex-boyfriend, Alex Mphahlele.

Sharat, new head of the Bantu Cooperative after the unfortunate demise of his predecessor.

Zaniah, a paramedic.

CONTINUITY COCK-UPS

1. Pg 8 "I'm listening to nothing but Pachar opera at the moment, and it's driving me crazy." As above, I suspect that should read Pakhar. But it doesn't.
2. Pg 54 "I told my unwanted companion to engineer a voyage into his own Swarchzchild singularity, or words to that effect." Which is a very strange spelling of "Schwarzschild singularity".

PLUGGING THE HOLES [Fan-wank theorizing of how to fix continuity cock-ups]

1. It's not the cute, Hamster-like creatures from Legacy at all, but a different, possibly more cultured race whose opera is one of the 700 Wonders of the Universe. One actually does shudder to think what opera performed by giant hamsters who sound like they're perpetually on helium would actually be like to experience.
2. It's clearly a different kind of singularity, with a similarly - albeit bizarrely - spelled name.

FEATURED ALIEN RACES
Pg 24 Someone described as "a spider-faced creature". It's not exactly clear whether his face is like a spider's face or whether his whole face actually looks like a spider.

Pg 69 Representatives from the Bantu Collective, a collective of humans and aliens which started out on Earth. Some of them have reddish skin.

Jauzans.

Pg 73 Mirachs, who have red heads (as opposed to being redheads).

Pg 171 Carl Ksokor (who is also probably Assan from the prologue) is a rare shape-changing creature with an opalescent sheen to his skin and weaponized charisma. We later learn that he was the last of indigenous Dimetans (Pg 216).

Pg 199 The scarab, technically an AI attack-and-destroy ship, achieves a measure of life and sentience (within the text; I'm not drawing assumptions), so I would argue it warrants a place here. It's certainly one of the most sympathetic characters in the novel.

FEATURED LOCATIONS
Pg 1 An unnamed planet, home of the Narayayans (and eventually revealed, probably, to be Dimetos of the distant past).

Pg 8 St. Oscar's University, Dellah, 2595.

Pg 20 The planet Dimetos, including its capital city, Dimetos City, 2595. The planet has two moons.

IN SUMMARY - Anthony Wilson
I actually really enjoyed this. The plot's a good one, harking back to the mythological-danger-from-the-dawn-of-time style of the NAs of old, and the resolution is both satisfying and unexpected, with some great set-pieces on the way. But the real triumph is the writing, which is poetic and, at times, quite beautiful; the line "And he became a memory in front of her eyes" was probably my favourite, although I was spoiled for choice, which is always nice. A bit of an unregarded gem, this one.